Retail shifts to influence and fulfillment

In the next 10 years, the retail landscape will look and feel much different than it does today. “You’re going to be looking at a world that, instead of [retail] channels, there will be points of influence and methods of fulfillment,” Bryan Gildenberg, chief knowledge officer at Kantar Retail, said during a two-day drug channel workshop Kantar hosted in May. “Where can I influence shoppers irrespective of where the buying takes place, and how do I fulfill that in a way where I can still keep my operations efficient and make money?”

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While that point of influence is as likely to be on a smartphone as it is in a physical location, order fulfillment won’t necessarily mean home delivery.



“The United States is still going to be a market, particularly in the short- to medium-term, that will be dominated by home delivery in densely populated areas and by click-and-collect in more traditional suburban marketplaces,” Gildenberg said. And store footprints are likely to shrink, as growth across smaller-store formats is presently outpacing growth across larger formats.



And primary care services will migrate to the retail arena.



“Primary care doctors are going to go away,” Gildenberg said. “If you look at the continued efforts that the pharmacies are putting into [provider status], it just makes sense that retail pharmacy will turn into a distribution platform for some kind of health care,” he said. “The need for diagnostic triage is going to be unbelievably valuable to a healthcare system that’s going to be capacity restrained.”